Video after the jump.

Pawlenty’s first comment to Hannity out of the gate was this clearly prepared line: “In Minnesota we don’t have term limits but we do have common sense and good judgment, and we’re also good about taking turns.”

There are several ways to interpret that statement. On the surface it’s simply about knowing when to quit and give someone else a chance.

But here’s another context in which to consider it. Pawlenty famously had his turn at running for the U.S. Senate taken away in 2002 when then-Vice President Dick Cheney and Bush advisor Karl Rove leaned heavily on him to switch to the governor’s race, making room for favored son Norm Coleman to run against Sen. Paul Wellstone.

So “good at taking turns” could refer to Pawlenty’s stepping aside then — and possibly taking his turn to run for U.S. Senate at the next good opportunity.

Another way to hear it: The guy who took Pawlenty’s turn in 2002 (Coleman) isn’t good at taking turns or knowing when to quit.

The former senator’s prolonged election dispute with Al Franken has put Pawlenty on the spot: It’s his job as governor to issue and sign an election certificate to the winner.

Pawlenty has vacillated on when and if he’ll do so, milking suspense from what might otherwise have been a routine (if distasteful in a partisan sense) anointing of Franken and ratcheting up his own political cachet in the process.

Still another more far-fetched read on the remark might take the turn-taking as a knock on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who came from behind to oust runner-up Pawlenty in the GOP veepstakes last year.

She had her turn on the national ticket and should step aside as a 2012 presidential frontrunner so Pawlenty can have his chance. Minnesotans are good at taking turns — are Alaskans?

In another revelation during his Hannity appearance, Pawlenty confided that he’d spoken with others who had served three terms as governor and counseled him not to run for re-election. (He wouldn’t name them.)

Hannity pressed Pawlenty on whether he’s contemplating a presidential run. Pawlenty repeated he’s not ruling anything in or out.

Here is the video of Pawlenty on Hannity’s program:

Pawlenty, who’s in the midst of a media flurry not seen since he was in the thick of the vice-presidential slot, also appeared on local TV. In an interview with WCCO’s Pat Kessler (video), the governor wasn’t any more forthcoming about his White House hopes than he was with Hannity: “Three years out, I don’t know what I’m going to be doing.”

But T-Paw was unabashed about still dancing to Cheney’s tune. When Kessler asked about the former vice president’s statements that the country is less safe under Obama, Pawlenty had a ready reply: ”He’s worth listening to.”

[Via Minnesota Public Radio's Polinaut blog]

Michael Steele (WDCpix)

Here’s more evidence that the GOP is still struggling to find fitting metaphors to talk about itself. The party was likened to a miffed Eminem by Gov. Tim Pawlenty at the College Republicans’ national confab over the weekend, while at another of the convention’s sessions, RNC chair Michael Steele was coming up with imagery of his own. Steele told the audience that “no one knows what the hell it means” when the GOP refers to itself as a “big tent.”

So he offered another analogy: The GOP is a hat.

Some people wear a hat frontwards, others cocked to the left, he explained. Some wear it backwards, he added, echoing a past statement, “because that’s how they roll.” But “the strength of the party is in this: … the fact that you’re willing to put the damn thing on… The problem we’ve had as a party is: too many of our friends, neighbors, colleagues are taking the hat off, because we’ve decided we don’t like the way they wear it… The GOP is not about how you wear the hat, but the fact that you want to wear the hat.”

A tent large enough to fit all kinds of people seems a more compelling idea than a hat that can be worn as personal preference dictates. But maybe the new metaphor has less to do with how the cap fits than with how the old metaphor doesn’t.

When longtime Republican Sen. Arlen Specter left the party to become a Democrat in late April he used the metaphor: “Since my election in 1980, as part of the Reagan Big Tent, the Republican Party has moved far to the right.” And many news outlets picked up the lingo. The San Francisco Chronicle said the “‘big tent’ shrinks“; The Week ran a cartoon showing an elephant-shaped tent flying a “Conservatives only” flag; and The Hill wrote that the “giant swishing sound you’re hearing is the GOP’s ‘big tent’ being folded up and packed away.”

Hats off to the new branding.

Watch it:

Wellstone Action, a group that carries on grassroots organizing work in the late Minnnesota senator’s name, distributed this video via Twitter today. In it, Wellstone talks about building grassroots leaders to create “a citizen politics that can beat a big money politics.”

If we’re going to have the kind of change in our country that’ll make the United States of America a better America, I guarantee you it’ll be the result of much more grassroots politics … I think we need to get our values out there, I think we need to get an exciting, bold agenda out there, and then I think we need to do a better job of doing the grassroots organizing and building our leadership. That’s the way we’re going to make the change in the country.

Here is the video:

Actually, there is a six-degrees-type connection between Franken and Malcolm X:

Until he announced his run for U.S. Senate in early 2007, Franken hosted a weekday radio show on the Air America network from noon to 3 p.m., Eastern Time. Last week, Air America announced that the new host in Franken’s old time slot is Ron Kuby. In 1995, Kuby, with former law associate William Kunstler, represented Qubilah Shabbazz against charges (filed in Minneapolis) that she tried to hire an FBI informant to kill Louis Farrakhan, who she suspected of involvement in the 1965 death of her father, Malcolm X.

It’s work that could help provide important clues to a “novel” disease of near-pandemic proportions that exhibits changes that so far have experts around the world guessing.

“This investigation that we’re doing here is crucial to understanding how this virus (spreads),” Magnan said.

She said despite tests on others, the person confirmed today as having the “novel H1N1 influenza” is still the only “probable” case found in the state.

The commissioner spoke at a press conference in Cold Spring this morning after a meeting with state and local officials. The town is home to Rocori Middle School, with which officials say the person with the new flu is “associated.”

“There will be more cases,” Gov. Tim Pawlenty predicted, repeating a warning that State Epidemiologist Dr. Ruth Lynfield made yesterday. But he said officials are certain of very little because of the unpredictable “wave phenomenon” attributed to the disease.

The governor was careful not to reveal information about the infected person, who he said “may not be a student” at Rocori Middle School. The school will remain closed for seven days, he said, in accordance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevenetion recommendations.

The board at neighboring St. Boniface Elementary School, which like the middle school was closed yesterday and today, will decide this afternoon whether to remain closed.

Rocori High School, site of a fatal school shooting incident in 2003, isn’t affected. “We don’t have any concern about elementary or high school (infections),” said Rocori Superintendent Scott Staska.

Asked about testing of the infected person’s family, Magnan answered only that that was part of the investigation.

Magnan, who said she arrived late at the press conference because she had been in a bathroom following her own advice about washing hands thoroughly, offered this declaration: “We are ready. We are ready as a state. We are ready as a region.”

One way the state is more ready than it was yesterday at this time: “All swine influenza (Web) pages were updated to reflect the new name of H1N1 novel influenza,” according to an e-mail from the Minnesota Department of Health sent Wednesday at 7:02 p.m.

They’re wearing riot gear in London and they’re talking recounts in New York. It’s all so St. Paul, last fall.

St. Paul to London

Demonstrators, massed in the capital city to protest a gathering of people who wield political power, met police wielding riot-control weaponry. A bank’s windows were broken. Peaceful crowds were trapped by police moving in pincer formations.

It could have been the Republican National Convention (RNC), September 2008, in  St. Paul, Minn.. But it was the G20 Summit, April 2009, in London, England.

Differences: A man died in London after he collapsed in an area police had hemmed in. (Natural causes, one protester said; thrown bottles hampered police medics’ efforts, police said.) And the United States of America has a Bill of Rights that’s supposed to guarantee freedom of speech; England doesn’t.

Uncanny similarity: For their summit, the G20 leaders selected a London location that people call the ExCel Centre. The RNC took place at St. Paul’s Xcel Center.

Minnesota to New York

As Election Day turns into The Day After (and the day after that), the margin between two candidates dwindles to less than a half-percent of the total votes cast. Fundraising for a recount and charges of election-stealing ensue.

Sounds like the Minnesota U.S. Senate election, November 2008 — but it’s New York’s special congressional election, April 2009, where Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by a mere 25 votes.

Differences: New York doesn’t count its absentee ballots until after Election Day and gives overseas ballots an extra couple of weeks to arrive — leaving thousands of votes still to include in the canvass. (Minnesota counts all absentee ballots on Election Day and accepts none that arrive any later.) And President Obama made a last-minute robocall that could have made the difference with Election Day returns. (Candidate Obama made no such pitch for Franken.)

Uncanny similarity: The parallel universes are converging as Republicans fall back on discredited election-stealing charges from the Al Franken-Norm Coleman dispute to prime the cash pump for New York’s post-election drama. (Democrats, presumably slightly less prone to getting riled since they hold slim leads in both races, are so far making a more generic fundraising pitch in New York.)

Former Sen. Norm Coleman Photo: WDCpix

Norm Coleman’s campaign spokesman Cullen Sheehan suggested in an e-mail sent to supporters this morning that Wikileaks.org’s publication of the campaign’s donor database — including donors’ credit card numbers and the three-digit security codes for those cards — is the work of politically motivated people who have “found a way to breach private and confidential information.”

Sheehan hinted that the leak might be a work of political sabotage: “We don’t know if last evening’s e-mail is a political dirty trick or what the objective is of the person who sent the e-mail.”

MinnPost’s Joe Kimball echoed Sheehan’s notion that the database was hacked, writing this morning that “some hackers (Web enthusiasts, [the Minnesota Independent] calls them), apparently discovered that list.”

But the database was not revealed by hackers, according to IT professional Adria Richards, who was the first to share news of the unprotected file in late January.

“It’s not hacking,” she said. “I didn’t use any hacking tools. A browser was my tool.”

Richards said she discovered the database by entering colemanforsenate.com, into OpenDNS’ cache-check tool, which gave her an IP address where the Web site lived.

Simply copying that address into a Firefox browser revealed the Web site directories for colemanforsenate.com.

Richards didn’t download the database herself, but she posted a screen capture of what she’d found online after she made the discovery.  An IT consultant  for 10 years, she published her findings on her blog to educate others about the risks of improperly managed websites, she said.

“All you needed was a Web browser,” she said. “It’s like I walked over to Norm Coleman’s house and saw his door was open, took a photo of the open door and posted it on the Internet.”

Richards began her digging when sites like MNpublius and the Minnesota Independent started questioning a Coleman campaign assertion that its Web site crashed because of a traffic overload on a searchable database of voters “disenfranchised” in the U.S. Senate election that pitted Coleman, the Republican incumbent, against Democrat Al Franken.

The campaign’s claims about the crash have been discredited, but Richards said she “noticed there was a bigger issue at hand than the site being down.”

She said she’s interested in Internet security, not in attacking Coleman, adding that she’d raise the same issues if anyone else, even a close friend, had the same type of Web security issues.

At least one local Web developer has downloaded the database from the Coleman site, which seems to contradict a Coleman campaign statement that no “unauthorized party” downloaded the database. That person won’t speak on record for fear of prosecution by the Coleman campaign.

I clicked on the link to the database, which was provided by an anonymous commenter (not Richards) at MnIndy, but didn’t proceed to  download the contents.

What if I had? Would I be a hacker, to use Kimball’s term?

“That’s not hacking,” Richards said. “If you can download Firefox from Firefox.com — if you download a picture from your grandma, you’re downloading a file. Is that hacking? Five-year-olds can download files.”

Further, she said she wonders why the Coleman campaign brought in federal authorities to see if there was a security breach, as Sheehan told supporters in this morning’s e-mail.

“[Team Coleman's] traffic records should, could and would show if someone downloaded the file,” she said. “You don’t need the FBI to figure it out. Even Google Analytics show you what files people downloaded.”

She’s also skeptical about the campaign’s comment about federal authorities checking the Coleman site’s firewall. A firewall typically is used to grant or deny access to a server or network, not a database on a Web site.

The Coleman campaign has not yet responded to requests to clarify these issues.

Related:

Coleman donors express ‘extreme anger,’ fear, worry after breach

‘Crashgate’ reveals unprotected donor database on Coleman’s site

AP source Jared Reise (in hat) with "Among the Oats" cast. Photo: MN Fringe Festival

It’s apparently hard for reporters to find an ordinary voter to comment on the extraordinary struggle over Minnesota’s vacant U.S. Senate seat. The latest example: The Associated Press cited one person — who didn’t vote for either Al Franken or Norm Coleman — in its story Monday about Minnesotans being “tired” of the Senate battle. Jared Riese turns out to be an unlikely but not entirely inapt electoral Everyman.

UPDATE: The AP talked to 24 voters for the story, writer Brian Bakst tells the Minnesota Independent, but national editors removed all but one. Most were indeed tired of it all, according to Bakst. Read an excerpt from the AP’s in-state version after the jump.   

The AP’s headline fooled Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post into seeing more than one voter quoted. He wrote in his blog, The Fix:

What’s clear is that the average Minnesotan is growing tired of the back and forth. The Associated Press penned a piece today entitled “Minnesota Senate race leaves voters tired of law drama” that featured a series of quotes from residents of the Land of 10,000 Lakes expressing their disinterest [sic] in the entire thing.

But despite the headline, the AP story contains not a series of quotes but a single quote from one average Minnesotan:

Some Minnesotans, like actor Jared Reise, are past caring who wins and just want the state to regain its second senator.

“This is a very important time to have everybody there, with the way the economy is,” said Reise, of suburban Eagan, who didn’t vote for either man on Nov. 4. “It’s a little long-winded, this whole recount.”

UPDATE: Bakst tells MnIndy by e-mail that Riese said he voted for Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley. He was one of two dozen randomly selected people whom the AP’s Liz Riggs interviewed in downtown Minneapolis. Here’s an excerpt from the fuller version of their AP story:

Meanwhile, voters are losing patience.

“Enough is enough,” said legal secretary Julianne Hill, a Franken voter from St. Bonifacius. “I think there’s been plenty of review and plenty diligence and I think it’s time for Coleman to give it up.”

None of several Coleman voters interviewed by The Associated Press would speak for attribution. While some were ready to move on, one was adamant that her candidate take it to the bitter end.

It’s not the first time that an “average voter” quoted in a widely circulated story about the Minnesota Senate dispute has turned out to be other than average. Christina Capecchi, writing for The New York Times last November, didn’t reveal that her “ordinary voter,” who voiced concerns about where Al Franken’s votes came from, was really a veteran Republican operative who had served on former U.S. Sen. Rod Grams’ campaign and Senate staffs, run as a GOP candidate himself, and been named in a Franken campaign-practices complaint.

But the AP story raises a different question: Can a man who never had a dog in the Coleman-Franken fight speak to the tiredness felt by the nearly 3 million Minnesotans who did vote for one candidate or the other? Probably not. But although he’s far from average, Jared Reise, it turns out, brings a lot to the Everyman role in which the AP cast him.

Reise appears from his blog to be a thoughtful guy who’s almost past caring about more than the Senate contest. He wonders after a dozen years in and out of the Twin Cities theater scene whether calling himself an actor is worth it. He tells his temp agency to “cram it.”

And he throws himself into presenting an absurdist play about three men stuck in oatmeal together that could be a metaphor for the Senate contest if you remember Independence Party runner-up Dean Barkley.  A well-liked if ill-attended entry in last year’s Minnesota Fringe Festival, “Among the Oats” (video) left the actual oats to the audience’s imagination. But the play’s bickering is as real as what the Coleman and Franken camps do in court every day — and one of the actors even manages to threaten to take their dispute to the Supreme Court.

“The decision I have made is both professional and personal,” Carstarphen said in a statement. “This opportunity allows me to continue doing work that I am passionate about: closing the achievement gap and accelerating achievement for all students in a diverse urban setting.”

The development hardly comes as a surprise. Last week the Austin-American Statesman reported that Carstarphen was among the finalists for the job, and she’d been extremely cagey in her public statements. Last evening Pioneer Press reporter Doug Belden noted her conspicuous presence at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Destination Austin, perhaps?

Castarphen will stay on through the end of the school year. She has been in the St. Paul post for three years.

Watch Burris’ press conference after the jump.